Rostam and Hamilton Leithauser On Their New Joint Album, Sax Dreams, and Hangovers

The musical partnership between Hamilton Leithauser and Rostam Batmanglij began, as so many do, by disturbing the parental peace. The former lead singer for the Walkmen and the now-former multi-instrumentalist for Vampire Weekend are both originally from Washington, D.C., and they’d meet up when they went home for the holidays. “Two years in a row at Thanksgiving and Christmas we would be up in Rostam’s high school bedroom,” Leithauser recalls to Pitchfork now. “The first time we were out there, I was just wailing away and singing so loud, and then you heard this voice from the bottom of the stairs, and it’s Rostam’s dad. He’s yelling from downstairs, like, ‘Rostam, are you OK?’ It was like we were teenagers up there.”

Leithauser, based in Brooklyn, and Batmanglij, who was based in Brooklyn but now lives in Los Angeles, will release their first collaborative album together, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, on September 23. Written and recorded from July 2014 to February 2016, the record pairs one of 21st-century rock’s great voices with a pop auteur who spent years dreaming up production ideas for that voice. The result ups the lush arrangements and doo-wop tropes Batmanglij toyed with on the last Vampire Weekend record and fills them with another charismatic indie-rock vocalist. Leithauser, meanwhile, brings his smoky croon and elegantly rumpled lyrics, evoking early “Mad Men” melancholy and barroom singalongs in musty mid-century dives.

The two met in March 2008, when Vampire Weekend made it to the Earl in Atlanta to open for the Walkmen, despite having played “Saturday Night Live” the night before. Leithauser and Batmanglij didn’t start working on songs together until years later, beginning with “1959,” which turned out to be the final song on I Had a Dream That You Were Mine (and features guest vocalist Angel Deradoorian). Batmanglij ended up writing, producing, and performing on two tracks from Leithauser’s solo debut LP, 2014’s Black Hours (“Alexandra” and “I Retired”). “It was a progression from there,” Leithauser says. They recorded almost the whole album in Batmanglij’s home studio in Los Angeles—making it the first LP cut there—except for the drums, played by White Rabbits’ Stephen Patterson, which they did in an outside studio.

They decided to bill themselves by their names, rather than as another Leithauser solo record that happened to be co-written and produced by Batmanglij (or as a new project altogether), out of tribute to Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and producer Brian Eno, who teamed up for a pair of celebrated collaborativealbums. “We wanted to put the record out in that way that both of our identities would be intact,” Batmanglij explains. They recently spoke with Pitchfork over the phone, both from New York but in different locations, about the making of their record.

The first song you worked on was “1959,” and the album delves into a variety of mid-20th-century styles. Why that era?

Hamilton Leithauser: At some point we found something we both liked. We had that song “Rough Going”—that was one of the early ones we did and that was kind of like, I just had a rolly chord progression and then Rostam put like shooby doo wops on it.

Batmanglij: [laughs]

Leithauser: And it sounded funny, but it sounded great. At the end of “I Retired” [from Leithauser solo LP Black Hours], we had some shooby doo wops, so that might be where that started, and it’s sort of our sound. I thought it sounded very exciting.

Batmanglij: When we did those two songs that ended up on Black Hours, we both had this mutual feeling like there was some music that we’d always wanted to make and that when we were working together we were able to make that music.

Leithauser: Yeah, definitely.

Batmanglij: And for me, as someone who listened to all the Walkmen records from 2001 to 2012, I at the same time as I was listening to those I was kind of thinking, “Oh you know what would be cool would be a song with Hamilton singing that had this kind of drum beat or this kind of chord progression or this kind of vibe.” Those kind of ideas were collecting in my head over maybe 10 years, so in that way it was very easy to start songs, because there was just kind of a back catalogue of ideas that had been gestating for a while.

Anything specifically?

Batmanglij: Yeah, I’d always wanted to do a song with finger-picked, nylon-string guitar. That was one of those signature sounds that you hear on a lot of classic songs—Vashti Bunyan, Tropicália, and Leonard Cohen as well—and then one day Hamilton was just playing something on the steel-string, it was just a little finger-pick pattern that he had, and I said, “Hey, you know what, that would sound great on a nylon-string guitar and if we double tracked it and panned it left-right.” So we knew that that was how the song had to go. It was about chasing down that idea, but yeah, I’d always wanted to do a nylon-string finger-picker.

Leithauser: I’ve listened to Leonard Cohen since I was a teenager. I’ve tried so many times over the years to do that kind of thing actually, and that song [Rostam’s talking about], “In a Black Out”—that’s a song that I wrote mostly for the Walkmen record Heaven, but I could never get the part sounding good where I was playing. It sort of didn’t make much sense in Walkmen anyhow.

Hamilton, what does Rostam bring as a producer that’s different from people you’ve worked with in the past?

Leithauser: It’s entirely different for us. For so many years I made my demo and then waited. My band lived in five different cities, and I would make a demo in a Brooklyn closet somewhere and then I’d have it on an mp3—originally on tape—for months until we could get together and try as it a band and maybe get it into the studio. By that point, you gotta force yourself to be excited about your year-old idea. But here I was just able to get things recorded immediately and use them. That was what was so different about this for me.

Rostam, youtalked to usearlier this year about the importance of telling a story. Can you say anything about the inspiration behind the lyrics here?

Batmanglij: My role on this was oftentimes to be in some ways Hamilton’s editor. I would contribute lyrics, but I think a lot of what I brought was sort of focusing a narrative and trying to make sure that there was always a picture being painted, and even just telling Hamilton, “If I close my eyes, I don’t see anything when I hear that lyric—is there a lyric that can make me see something?”

Leithauser: Like all the lyrics I’ve ever done that I’ve liked, I based it on the song and the melody first. I rarely ever write words on a page and then try to turn it into music. Part of it would be written right when he and I would start a song, and I would take that home and work on it. We would go over things, but we tried to keep a lot of original takes and a lot of original moments, so it did feel like naturally it did have sort of a narrative, and it was almost like there was a character in it that went all the way through the record. They’re about different people and different situations, but to me, I guess it’s all sort of “you write what you know” kind of stuff. It did seem like there was a consistent voice that went through the whole thing, that’s inspired by the music.

Batmanglij: I can reveal two secrets of Hamilton Leithauser’s lyric-writing process. One of them is that, if you can believe it, he plays chess on his phone while we’re writing lyrics and it makes him better at writing lyrics.

Leithauser: That’s true.

Batmanglij: It doesn’t sound like it could be real but it works. And the other one is Hamilton has all these lyrics very well organized on his iCloud system, so that it updates on the laptop, on the iPhone, everywhere.

Leithauser: It was such a lifechanger for me when they made it so you could write something on your computer and then it would correct it onto the phone.

Musically, it’s not all mid-20th-century inspiration. There are some elements on here that only you, Rostam, would bring.

Leithauser: There’s a lot of synth and sub-bass, and we have drums that almost sound intentionally programmed in parts. And that shooby doo wop is something that Rostam added in— it’s like taking old elements and making new sounds out of it. Even the beginning of “Rough Going” and “In the Truth Is,” the moment you hear the shoo-bop shoo-bop, it can remind you of the Flamingos and things like that, but not for a second do you think it’s from 1959. It sounds completely modern, which I thought was a really cool thing.

“Rough Going” also has a saxophone on it.

Batmanglij: I feel like when I was in college I was listening to the Walkmen a lot and I actually have a memory of having a dream and in the dream I saw the Walkmen perform with saxes.

Leithauser: [laughs] Are you serious?!

Batmanglij: So putting sax on the song, with Hamilton singing, was something I wanted to do for 10 years. The story behind recording that saxophone is we had about a week. We’d do these week stretches of working together where Hamilton would come stay with me in L.A., and we’d go into the studio and have these marathon work sessions, and at the end of one of those sessions we had both drank way too much, and it was a Sunday, and I was feeling very impulsive, and I called a sax player that I’d never met before [Joe Santa Maria] and I had him come over and I said, “Hamilton, have I got a surprise for you. We’re going to record sax.”

Leithauser: I don’t even think I got off the couch.

Batmanglij: We were just about as hungover as two people could possibly be, but we ended up having one of the most productive days in—

Leithauser: That unfortunately happened a couple times, didn’t it? We got a lot of good stuff done we when he had a little too much the night before.

Batmanglij: Sometimes the hangover provides inspiration.

Leithauser: The thing is, we started really gradually, and had these really creative bursts that were awesome, but making this record took a really long time. It was a lot of work. It wasn’t just like drinking, a couple sessions here and there, and then taking a vacation. It was just getting all the things right.